


From One End of the World to Another

by mahoni



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Action/Adventure, Angst, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-08
Updated: 2008-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahoni/pseuds/mahoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene from episode 4x20. John comes out of stasis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From One End of the World to Another

John woke from fever dreams of the wraith they called Michael tearing Teyla's child from her body; of himself dying alone in a burning, abandoned city; of everything lost and hopeless.

He heard Rodney shouting at him from far away, and at first it was a relief, a sound he could hold onto while he dragged himself from his nightmares. But then he really started to wake up, and started to feel how weak, parched and sore he was. His stomach cramped, his muscles felt liquid, and his head pounded, and he decided it was time for Rodney to shut the hell up.

"Mmph," he said. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Go away, Rodney. I'm sick."

His voice was raspy and so soft it barely made a dent in the dead silence of the room. Rodney didn't hear him, and didn't shut up.

He groaned and waited for the room to stop spinning. At some point he'd fallen out of his bed; he was laying on the floor. He managed to get his arms under him and roll himself over onto his back.

The floor was gritty against his bare forearms and hands, and then uncomfortably warm against his back. The air was stale and thin in his mouth, and --

A long time ago _something small and hysterical in his head cracked up at that_ he had sat through a cold desert night with the corpse of a friend and tried not to fall asleep, because the worst nightmares were the kind you woke up from and found out that they weren't nightmares at all.

An icy cold that had nothing to do with fever washed over him. His lungs felt frozen and his heart started to thud in his chest because _that wasn't a dream_ he wasn't sick, he was just hot. The floor was warm because the planet was being scorched by a dying sun. And Rodney --

"...Sheppard...hurry..."

Rodney was dead.

Everyone was dead.

He opened his eyes. The stasis room was nearly pitch black. A light glowed weakly by the door, and flickered as he stared at it.

How long?

He was alone, absolutely alone, not like yesterday _no, hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years ago_ when at least he had the ghost of a wrinkly McKay to offer the illusion of company. Rodney's voice looped non-stop in his ear, but that was all. Just a voice.

Last human alive, anywhere. John didn't even understand that. How was he supposed to understand that? It didn't mean anything, because it didn't make sense.

"You said you'd be here," he heard himself say.

"Sheppard? Are you... I'm sorry, but you have to..."

They had had a plan. That fact started seeping through everything else _no one. Anywhere. At all. Probably not even on Earth. If Earth even still exists_ along with what it meant:

Teyla. Everyone; but first, Teyla.

He rolled over and dragged himself to his hands and knees.

"You have to _hurry_..."

The room spun again and his arms almost buckled. He panted, trying to get enough air into his lungs.

"I'm hurrying, Rodney," he whispered. "I'm hurrying. Jesus."

He moved as quickly as he could, which was not quickly at all, but eventually managed to get to his feet. Blood rushed in his ears and he had trouble catching his breath, but he stayed upright. He stood for a moment, swaying, and felt his shirt pockets. His GDO and the crystal with the information about where to find Teyla -- they were still there, tucked safely away. His vest and P90 he hadn't been able to take into stasis; they were somewhere in the darkness at his feet, no doubt the worse for a thousand years of non-use.

His comm spat out Rodney's voice, half-drowned in static, as he made his way to the door. He ignored Rodney for the moment -- not Rodney, Rodney was dead, just Rodney's voice -- using the lonely, flickering light by the door to guide him there. The lack of power in the room and the fact that Rodney -- the hologram, anyway -- hadn't appeared yet were not good signs. The plan had been for Rodney to program the generators to use solar power from the system's dying star to power not only the stasis field and the gizmo that allowed Rodney's hologram to exist, but also to power the city's shields. The sun would expand too much before emitting the kind of solar flare that could send John home, and the planet's atmosphere would be burned away; the shields were supposed to trap some of that atmosphere around the city so that John could survive the journey from the stasis room to the gate room.

It must have worked, since he was still alive, but if things like the lights and the holographic projector weren't working, he wondered how long the shield would last. Not to mention whether there was enough power to work the DHD.

He felt his way through the door, and turned down the dark hall, retracing the path he'd taken yesterday.

Or, okay, several hundred years ago. Christ.

There was a glow down the hallway, and as he got closer he saw that it was coming through an open door. He didn't know what he was expecting to see when he got there, but he wasn't at all prepared for what he did see.

The door opened onto the courtyard he had to cross in order to go around the caved-in hallway between him and the gate room. The last time he'd crossed this courtyard, wind-driven sand had made the world a swirling yellow blur and nearly scoured off his skin. Now the courtyard was absolutely still, the sand laying in drifts along his path, against the pitted Ancient buildings, and against the edge of the force field.

He stepped through the door and looked up.

Waves of something -- maybe heat from the red giant, maybe space dust, maybe even fits of failing power -- rippled across the force field, so that John could see how it stretched like a distended sphere to protect only the central tower and part of the structure he'd just come from. Beyond that, all that remained were twisted, blackened ruins jutting out of a blasted landscape. The deep, glittering blackness of space seemed to close in around the planet.

Rodney was still shouting in his ear, and he realized he was standing there in the courtyard gaping, wasting time. He forced himself forward a few steps, until a bright flash out of the corner of his eye stopped him flat again. He looked without thinking, catching only a glimpse before the intensity was too much for his eyes and he buried his face in his hands. The image was burned in his mind, though.

The sun sat just above the horizon behind him, angry and dark and swollen, like a fist-full of hell oozing up from a black and star-struck ocean. It was like nothing he had ever seen in his life.

"John, you _idiot_...like an ass, you...to _go_..."

It probably said something about his relationship with Rodney that even just a holographic version of him yelling at John and calling him an idiot jolted him out of his stupor. He took a shaky breath and let the knee-jerk irritation _Rodney's dead_ get him moving.

He navigated mostly by memory while the blinding after-image of the sun faded from his vision, but eventually tripped through the door at the base of the central tower. Once inside he stumbled around until he found the stairs and started up.

"Rodney," he said. "How long?" He was breathless, from the bad air and from the vivid illustration he'd just had of exactly how tiny his world had become. "The shield -- how long?"

"Not long. You..."

Static.

"Rodney?"

Static. Static that went on and on, counterpoint to his own wheezing, and his feet pounding the metal stairs, and _he's gone, he's dead, the power is gone, I'm gone_ \--

"...gate. Time...John. Just, hurry."

He came out in the control room. Across from him, through the door he'd pried open when he'd first arrived, was the rippling force field and a mess of stars.

One of the panels in the control room was lit up; it was the DHD, with a few gate symbols already activated. As he neared it, another flashed on with a _thunk_ and he heard the hum of the gate as the symbol locked in.

Rodney was talking non-stop again.

"...loop around...Atlantis. Do you...round so you'll step out in...IDC. Do you understand? I've...address for Atlantis. ...Sheppard?"

"Wait," John said. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the words that made it through the static. "You're dialing, what, you're dialing Atlantis?"

"Yes! ...IDC. For god's sake, do you under..."

John dug his GDO out of his pocket and made for the stairs down to the gate platform. "You're dialing Atlantis? But I'm _in_ Atlantis, how the hell -- "

He cringed as the static erupted in a short wail of feedback.

"...matter! Just send your...idiot!"

The gate whooshed on. Soft blue light flooded the empty room, and it was so out of place in this city that wasn't even a shadow of itself any more, and so beautifully familiar, that for a moment John couldn't speak.

"I got it," he said finally. He tore his gaze from the gate long enough to punch in his code. "Sending IDC."

He approached the gate slowly. It wasn't that he doubted Rodney...well, okay, it actually was that. He was still struggling with the concept of forty-eight _thousand_ years; and now Rodney, or, hell, not even Rodney, a program Rodney wrote tens of thousands of years ago, was wrangling a red giant and fighting failing power while attempting impossible calculations that could send John home from this wasteland at the end of the world, or send him no where at all.

He paused a step away from the event horizon.

"Are you sure this is going to work?" he said.

Static.

"Rodney?"

Static.

"McKay?"

And then silence.

His breath caught in his throat. Then a sudden pressure change made his ears pop, and he lunged through the gate --

*


End file.
